CHAPTER EIGHT Improbable Curators: Analysing Nostalgia, Authorship and Audience on Tumblr Microblogs Dinu Gabriel Munteanu Bournemouth University Introduction Launched in 2007 and hosting around 280 million blogs as of February 2016, Tumblr1 is one of the most popular yet under-researched microblogging plat- forms currently in existence. Having established itself as a premier venue of online popular and youth culture (Dewey, 2015), the service provides an idi- osyncratic synesthetic space wherein countless visual and stylistic statements are shared daily, ranging from digital images to literary excerpts, journal entries to animations. The absence of subordinating vertical structures (there exists no real ‘mainstream’ vs. ‘underground’ dynamic here), the possibility of interpret- ing the blogs both as niche and micro youth media (see Thornton, 1995, pp. 137-151) and the socially interactive element of these unregulated exchanges all reflects a parallel world rich in psycho-social connotations that remains largely uncharted by social scientists. How to cite this book chapter: Munteanu, D. G. 2017. Improbable Curators: Analysing Nostalgia, Authorship and Audience on Tumblr Microblogs. In: Graham, J. and Gandini, A. (eds.). Collabo- rative Production in the Creative Industries. Pp. 125–156. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/book4.h. License: CC-BY-NC- ND 4.0 126 Collaborative Production in the Creative Industries This chapter draws on a project that investigated these novel circulatory dynamics over a period of three years by employing digital ethnographic and semiotic analyses. By becoming highly selective content curators, these users develop independent, privately informed yet interpersonally mediated, digi- tally synesthetic narratives. The Tumblr infrastructure provided a system of content distribution and collaborative design that not only destabilises the three conventional ‘sites’ of an image (‘production’, ‘image’, ‘audience’) (cf. Rose, 2007, pp. 14–27), but also raises interesting questions with regard to individual agency and the ‘naturalisation’ of creative practices online. What type of vicarious ‘curatorial’ visions are being articulated here, what psychological and cultural functions might they serve and in what ways do these phenomena interact with mainstream material realities? How does Tum- blr’s potential as a platform for anonymous, flexible and easily accessible aes- thetic expression, stylistic experimentation and emotional catharsis compare with other social media offerings, and what might we learn from it in terms of encouraging reflexivity and meaningful social communication online? Finally, how do these loosely-woven user communities compare to cultural and crea- tive practises employed in contemporary museography and collaborative or activist online productions more broadly? I will begin with a brief description of the Tumblr platform itself, followed by a number of relevant semiotic and ethnographic examples extracted from the fieldwork for this project. These inform a more theoretical discussion in the latter part of the chapter, where I consider to what extent Tumblr might model the ideal ‘curatorial’ platform for emergent modes of collaborative pro- duction, as discussed by Jean-Paul Martinon in his book The Curatorial: A Phi- losophy of Curating (2013). I also use Tumblr-related observations to address issues related to contemporary museography and artistic knowledge trans- mission more broadly, referring in this process to the work of authors such as Malraux (1978) and Rancière (2009). I conclude by suggesting that there exists considerable potential for Tumblr communities to function as independ- ent sites of knowledge (re)production, acting as non-commercial user archives, or reflexive and dialogical repositories of individually-filtered cultural content. My analysis thereby also attempts to offer a more positive, conciliatory per- spective on the debates within new and social media, which tend to oscillate between optimism and pessimism (e.g., Fuchs, 2015; Gauntlett, 2015; Turow, 2012; Jakobsson & Stiernstedt, 2010; see also Hesmondhalgh, 2013, chapter 9). Tumblr: History and corporate topography Although considered a social networking or social media tool, the microblog- ging service Tumblr retains a number of unique characteristics, both in terms of interface design and functionality, as well as corporate philosophy. It is, for example, more complex and more eclectic than Pinterest, with which it shares only superficially similar ‘curatorial’ mechanics, in the sense that both services Improbable Curators 127 provide the tools to create collections of digital material. The latter, however, has over time become associated with a relatively sectarian community fuelled by a largely female demographic focused on creating massive archives of reci- pes, wedding gift ideas, crafts and the like (see Friz & Gehl, 2015), while Tum- blr continues to harbour a much more culturally heterogeneous user-base and content pool. In this sense, statistical data and industry commentaries (Tan, 2013; Dewey, 2015; Reeve, 2016) suggest that Tumblr has already surpassed Facebook as one of the most popular digital social network for teenagers (aged between 13 and 25). As Tech-Crunch’s Adam Rifkin noted, the service can per- haps even be understood as a sort of ‘Facebook 2.0’: ‘Facebook has become a real-life social network infested with parents, co-workers, ex-friends, and peo- ple you barely know, [while] Tumblr has become the place where young people express themselves and their actual interests with their actual friends’ (Rifkin, 2013, p. 2, original emphasis). Founded in February 2007, by November 2012 Tumblr had ‘shouldered its way into the top ten online destinations, edging out Microsoft’s Bing and draw- ing nearly 170 million visitors to its galaxy of user-created pages […]. Tum- blr’s tens of millions of registered users create[d] 120,000 new blogs every day, for a total of 86 million and counting, which drive some 18 billion page views per month’ (Bercovici, 2013, p. 1). Even before that, in September 2011, its funding rounds ‘valued Tumblr at $800 million, making [David] Karp’s [the then 26-year-old Tumblr CEO’s] 25%-plus stake worth more than $200 mil- lion. Then its traffic doubled’ (ibid, p.1). And then, of course, in June 2013, Tumblr was acquired for a little over one billion dollars by the legendary (ex) Googler Marissa Mayer, acting as Yahoo!’s new CEO. This move, meant to extend Yahoo!’s reach with a younger and more mobile demographic, imme- diately sparked concerns throughout the Tumblr ‘vernacular’, with corporate- and advertising-related anxieties soaring and industry commentators watching the developments closely (Walker, 2012). The deal struck between Mayer and an apparently uncompromising Karp hinged on the promise that the service would stay independent, and that no changes at CEO level would happen. In other words, Yahoo! accepted the challenge of acquiring Tumblr ‘without ruin- ing it’ (Brustein, 2013). This is all extremely significant, all the more so because Karp’s condescension towards conventional advertising is well known and has persisted even as his platform continues to face difficulties in turning a profit and sustaining its growth (see Walker, 2012; Edwards, 2013; Kim, 2016). As Elspeth Reeve (2016) notes, this tension is unlikely to be resolved in the near future: In 2010, its founder, David Karp, said, “We’re pretty opposed to adver- tising. It really turns our stomachs.” Then in 2011: “Making money off of Tumblr would be incredibly easy” — he’d throw up an AdSense ad on every user’s dashboard and make the site “wildly profitable”. In April 2012 sponsored content began appearing in users’ streams. Tumblr was, at that time, still a unicorn; the possibility of making money was just 128 Collaborative Production in the Creative Industries as powerful an asset as the actual making of it. In 2013, Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1 billion and began a new ad rollout, but after a year, Karp’s wild profitability still hadn’t materialized. A former Tumblr executive told The New York Times that Tumblr’s anonymity was a hurdle: “Real- world identities are valuable to advertisers. Tumblr doesn’t have that”. (para. 43) What renders Tumblr relatively unprofitable at a corporate level, however, is precisely what makes it extremely appealing to its users, who continue to benefit from an extremely streamlined sign-up process and intuitive pri- vacy controls that allow for complete anonymity, while encouraging effec- tive inter-blog communication. Its potential for virality is further enhanced through the minimalistic yet effective use of ‘reblogs’ and ‘likes’, while users continue to have complete aesthetic and functional control over the look of their microblog(s). All of these things create an overall non-commercial, even alternative feel to the entire platform, generating a radically emotive value to it that David Karp clearly understands and cultivates: ‘to me, Tumblr is very much about creative expression […] limitless creative expression, your page can look any way you want, you can tear out the Tumblr branding if you want and create something that just looks totally unique on the Web’ (Karp, 2011, cited in Dixon, 2011, 4:10). This relatively utopian state of affairs — where profitability is placed second to user interface and design — is arguably due to its CEO’s uncompromising principles (his disdain for standard advertising and popularity indexes